In case there's any doubt about his jet-setting bona fides, the Italian fashion photographer Giampaolo Sgura puts this credo at the top of his frenetic Twitter feed: "Giampy lives in Milan and New York and travel world for his Passion!!!!" Fortunately, his partner, the Spanish menswear stylist Miguel Arnau, feels much the same way. So it is perhaps fitting that this high-flying duo has created a home in Milan inside a former airplane-assembly factory.

Sgura, who has shot advertising campaigns for Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, bought the loft just over a decade ago after visiting a friend's architecture studio in east Milan. The gritty street was lined with old industrial buildings that were being converted to television and photography studios, design showrooms, and residential lofts.

Sgura soon learned about a nearby loft for sale and made the move. The location near one of Milan's three airports, Linate, was certainly convenient for this photographer on the go. "It's outside the city, quiet and calm," he says, "but it's also very central. I can get to the Duomo in just 15 minutes."

On the plus side, the former factory had great bones, with a soaring, steel-buttressed ceiling as well as glass walls that flood sunlight throughout the cavernous space. But it needed refinement. Sgura, who studied architecture before becoming a photographer, personally oversaw the interior renovation and design. It took him almost four years to transform the apartment into a supremely chic modern loft.

A few years later Arnau moved in, contributing his own keen design eye to the loft's continually evolving decor. "It was trendy to be minimal when I started," Sgura recalls. "But with time we brought in more furniture and added art, photography, and objects, so it's much warmer now than it used to be."

Fortunately for the two men, they live in Milan, home to the world's largest contemporary furniture fair—the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile. "We often go shopping at the Salone," Arnau says. Gradually, they turned their expansive living area into a showcase for contemporary Italian design, furnishing it with limited-edition pieces from such Milanese manufacturers as Cappellini.

Sgura, who, like Arnau, loves to cook, created an open kitchen with stainless steel cabinetry from Antonio Citterio's line for Arclinea. "It's a very useful kitchen, with a powerful stove and doors for hiding a coffee machine, blender, vacuum cleaner, and kettle," Sgura says. "From the outside everything looks simple and clean, but then you open cabinets and you are in a master chef's kitchen."

The pair like nothing more than to host friends and family for home-cooked meals that stretch late into the evening. But for a long time, the perfect dining table eluded them. Several years ago, while vacationing on Sardinia's Costa Smeralda, they visited a design show where they noticed a dining table made of scrap wood by the Dutch designer Piet Hein Eek. They regretted not buying it. A year ago, they once again made their pilgrimage to the Milan furniture fair—and there it was, with a matching bench. This time they snapped it up.

"It's made of recycled pieces, almost like a parquet floor," Arnau says. "It feels both old and modern at the same time."

If the handmade table adds character to the loft's mirrored dining area, the wood-paneled master bedroom is, by contrast, all warmth and cozy texture. Sgura conjured this intimate retreat behind an interior window, using curtains to filter light and conceal the space from the adjacent living area. The room is dark and sexy, with such sly touches as a fur-covered swivel chair and a pair of navy Murano-­glass chandeliers. Framed fashion photographs—from a classic image by Irving Penn to Steven Klein's portrait of Madonna doing yoga—decorate the walls.

The couple share two additional homes, a smaller loft in Barcelona and an apartment in New York's financial district, but their residence in Milan is the only one with a terrace large enough to satisfy what Sgura describes as his "obsession for gardening." He collects specimen plants, mainly tropical, which he keeps in containers both inside and outside his home. Last summer he hired a friend, the Greek prop stylist and artist Ilias Lefas, to create benches and an arbor for the terrace. "We wanted to evoke the feeling of a Greek summer," Sgura says of the white and blue outdoor scheme.

The terrace is accessed through a small living room on the loft's upper level. In this sun-drenched space, a long row of white cabinets is capped by an assortment of designer and vintage suitcases. "Most of them are very special, so I don't hide them," Sgura says. Having their luggage visible also feels reassuring. Soon enough, he and Arnau remind themselves, they will once again be taking flight.